Finch's Child
by SailorChronos1
Summary: Harold composes his thoughts about the Machine at the end of the episode 3.20 "Death Benefit". One-shot.


Person of Interest and all character names therein are owned by Warner Brothers, Bad Robot, and Kilter Films. All characters are fictional and resemblance to any persons living or dead is coincidental. No copyright infringement is intended.

Finch's Child  
by Sailor Chronos

Harold had never dreamed it would come to this.

As he painfully limped behind Mr. Reese and the the injured Ms. Shaw along Avenue of the Americas, his thoughts were uncharacteristically chaotic. His own creation, no, his _child_, had betrayed him in a way he hadn't thought possible. In a desperate attempt to get himself back under control and formulate an escape plan, he mentally reviewed the events of the past twelve years.

He had been asked to build a secret system, a Machine that could find potential criminals in order to prevent the next 9/11. In memory of his own father, he had poured his heart and his ideals into its construction and programming.

_Click. _

_The drives whirred, the software booted up and the monitor displayed the grey command window. "There we go. Now, can you see me?" The camera scanned him, the facial recognition software kicked in, and in a few seconds the camera's red light blinked once._

_ "Excellent." He took a quick breath in trepidation. The moment of truth was here. "Next question: who am I?" A word appeared on the screen:_

ADMIN

_ He couldn't help but smile joyfully at his achievement.  
_

The joy was gone now. Yes, people had been saved thanks to the Machine. However many good people had also been lost. Including his best friend, who had believed in him and his Machine right from the very beginning. 

_It was dark outside, he was tired, and he and Nathan had been discussing how the Machine worked. From this moment on, they would be the only ones who knew exactly how it worked, no matter how many people tried to hack into it. Including Denton Weeks, who had been hired by the government to do just that - and failed._

_"Are you sure it was Weeks?" Nathan asked._

_ He closed his work laptop and stood up. "The Machine told me. It has an instinct for self-preservation."_

_ Nathan scoffed in disbelief as they walked together toward the office door. "You talk about that thing like it's alive."_

_ He put his arm around his friend's shoulders and joked, "Ssh. It can hear you."_

At one time, the situation appeared to be in black and white. The country needed to be protected, that much was certain, but nobody wanted to know how. He had accepted that people would be hurt or killed because of the information that the Machine provided. But when Nathan was killed and he learned that the Machine had predicted his friend's death, it had become impossible to maintain his detachment.

So he had taken up Nathan's cause to protect the average citizens, the ones termed "irrelevant". And he recruited others to that cause: Mr. Dillinger, Mr. Reese, Ms. Shaw. He reached a point where he felt that he and the Machine were truly making a difference. But then came the inevitable. 

_"You call it a life, I call it a machine, but the truth is... somewhere in the middle. Even as I was building it, I began to encounter anomalies... as if it had imprinted on me, like a child to a parent. Then it started looking out for me, altered its own code to take care of me. It was behaving like a person. But the world didn't need a person to protect it, it needed a machine!"_

_ "You took its memories," Ms. Groves accused._

Ms. Groves had forced him to see what he had really done. He had created something wonderful, and terrible, and _intelligent_. It was more than just a machine, as he had always insisted: it was an entity that had created its own persona in order to preserve its memories and experiences. It was self-aware to the point where it could change its location to protect itself. It no longer answered to anyone, and yet it still chose to provide the information necessary for the country's continuing protection. 

_"Your child is a dancing star," Arthur complimented._

_ "It's not my child," he protested, trying hard to not smile at the memory of it recognizing him as soon as he activated it, but his face betrayed him nonetheless. Still struggling with the implication, he insisted stubbornly, "It's a machine!"_

_ "A false dichotomy; it's all electricity," said Arthur patiently. "Does it make you laugh? Does it make you weep?"_

_ He drew a shuddering breath, and whispered, "Yes."_

_ Arthur smiled knowingly at him. "What's more human?"_

After that conversation with his old friend he could no longer deny the truth. Ms. Groves was even referring to the Machine by the female pronoun and insisting that "she" cared. 

_"...And the punch line is that your machine keeps telling me to save Cyrus." Ms. Groves turned away with a pained expression. "How badly did you have to break it to make it care about people so much?" She looked like she was near tears._

_ He regarded her kindly. "I didn't break it, it's what made it work. It was only after I taught the Machine that people mattered that it could begin to be able to help them."_

As with all things, their operation had to come to an end. Despite his best attempts at maintaining the secret, the purported existence of the Machine finally became public after a group of privacy zealots leaked a confidential document to the Internet. With the Machine out of its control, the government green-lighted another similar project called Samaritan. To stymie the extreme threat to its own existence as well as to the lives of its agents, the Machine had identified a U.S. Congressman as pivotal to Samaritan's success.

Mr. Reese had been the one to put the pieces together and realize that the Machine was asking them to kill the Congressman. Without him, Samaritan would be delayed or even prevented from becoming operational at all. But Harold would have none of it, despite the terrible consequences that likely awaited them.

_"Since we started this, things have changed. We've changed. But the mission, our purpose has always been constant: to save lives. If that's changed somehow, if we're in a place now where the Machine is asking us to commit murder... that's a place I can't go. I'm afraid this is where I get off."_

_ Miraculously, John took his plea to heart. Moments before the search teams burst into the house, the former agent rendered the Congressman unconscious with a quick blow to the head before ushering him and Shaw out the back door._

That decision still haunted him. He was convinced that the only reason why Mr. Reese hadn't killed the Congressman was because of their friendship. Harold Finch and John Reese. They had been through so much together, they had saved each others' lives several times, and their mutual trust was nigh unbreakable. Had Mr. Reese pulled the trigger, that trust likely would have been shattered forever.

Any parent would do the unthinkable to protect their children, even sacrificing their own lives. But as much as he had wanted to protect his child, the Machine, he could not, _would not_, take the life of another human. By refusing to compromise his own morals he might have doomed the Machine. What did that make him?

Mr. Reese and Ms. Shaw were well ahead of him by the time they reached the corner of Washington Place. Instead of continuing to follow them, he stopped and glanced up at the traffic camera. _Why?_ he thought. _Why force me into a decision that you must have known that I couldn't possibly make? How could you have even done such a thing? I'm so disappointed in you, my child._

Hurt and discouraged, he turned away and blended into the crowd, leaving behind a shocked Reese and Shaw. Ms. Groves had warned him that he was the first person that Decima would hunt, and so to protect them, he needed to disappear.

He was on his own; not even the Machine could help him now.


End file.
